Mary Halvorson Profiled

Halvorson has, over the past 10 years, released a steady stream of fiercely individual albums, beginning in 2008 with Dragon’s Head, a trio record featuring the drummer Ches Smith and the bassist John Hébert, on the Firehouse 12 label. Halvorson’s rough, dry attack, with virtually no reverb, was a refreshingly appealing extension of the jazz guitar tradition, in large part because it seemed to have few antecedents aside, perhaps, from Marc Ribot, a collaborator, and maybe the late Derek Bailey. “She seemed to know not only who she was as a musician,” the critic Nate Chinen writes of Halvorson in his illuminating new book, Playing Changes: Jazz for the New Century, “but also precisely where she was headed.”